Susan Brind Morrow is the recipient of the 2022 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a former fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation. Morrow is the author of The Names of Things: A Passage in the Egyptian Desert, Wolves and Honey: A Hidden History of the Natural World, The Dawning Moon of the Mind: Unlocking the Pyramid Texts, and Water:Poems and Drawings.
Morrow was accepted at Barnard College, the women’s college at Columbia University, at the age of fifteen, and as an undergraduate and graduate student in the Classics Department at Columbia University studied hieroglyphic texts at Columbia and the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU for six years (1974-81), working on the papyri collection in the Egyptian Department of the Brooklyn Museum in a work-study job paid by Columbia University under the Egyptologist Bernard Von Bothmer from 1977-81. Morrow first went to Egypt as an archaeologist on the Dakhleh Oasis Project with the Royal Ontario Museum in 1980.
Morrow went to live and study in Egypt and Sudan between 1982 and 1990. Her first publications were translations of Arabic poetry (Salah Jahin, Amal Donqal, 1986) and on the Arabic Oral Tradition (Arab Folktales, The Nation, 1986). Morrow was the North-East Africa fellow of the Crane-Rogers Foundation/Institute of Current World Affairs from 1988-90. She studied desert traditions and perceptions of nature among the Beja between Egypt and Sudan, with a particular interest in the origin of hieroglyphs in the desert environment. Morrow’s decade of work culminated in her first book, The Names of Things: A Passage in the Egyptian Desert, one of three finalists for the Pen Award in 1998.
In 2002 Morrow became a doctoral student of Elie Wiesel at Boston University, pursuing a close reading of the Old Testament, and, independently, the Quran in the original Arabic. Morrow studied Buddhist texts with religious scholars, took classes in Sanskrit at Harvard, and traveled through India with E. Gene Smith, the Library of Congress representative in Asia, to visit the monastic libraries reconstituted from the vast trove of texts rescued by Smith from communist China.
In 2004 Morrow published her second book, Wolves and Honey: A Hidden History of the Natural World, and was selected to be one of the authors included in the Sowell Collection, a study collection at Texas Tech University of the papers of primary writers on the human interaction with nature.
As a Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, Morrow brought a new reading to the primary religious text of Egypt, the earliest complex religious text in the world, The Pyramid Texts, a dense body of hieroglyphic writing discovered by European archaeologists in 1880 on the interior walls of Old Kingdom Pyramids. Filtered through the European colonial mind, this significant world religious text was understood as an incoherent mix of myth and primitive magic spells, the central portion of which Egyptology called ‘The Cannibal Hymn’. Morrow uniquely saw that this extensive hieroglyphic work was instead a compendium of mystical poetry made up of beautifully composed verses, some of which are direct astronomical references, others a description of the emergence of the soul and the soul reentering the stream of nature. Morrow’s translation and commentary, The Dawning Moon of the Mind, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2015
Morrow’s extensive notebooks on the Pyramid Texts and on hieroglyphs (1974-2014) were purchased by the Sowell Collection in 2017.
